Summer Reading for APECE English
Summer Reading Assignment for AP/ECE English


Summer Reading for AP/ECE UConn – English 140 - Halsey



Choose a pair:



Orphans in Fiction – David Copperfield and Orphan Master’s Son (New Pulitzer)

Charles Dickens and Adam Johnson

The Feminine Experience – Jane Eyre and The Woman Warrior

Charlotte Bronte and Maxime Hong Kingston

The Tortured Woman – Anna Karenina and A Thousand Splendid Suns

Leo Tolstoy and Khaled Hossieni

Immigration – A Passage to India and The Namesake

E. M. Forester and Jhumpa Lahiri

African Nation – Things Fall Apart and Cutting for Stone

Chinua Achebe and Abraham Verghese

American Landscape – Grapes of Wrath and The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

John Steinbeck and David Wroblewski

Asian Fusion – The Story of the Stone (Penguin) and Joy Luck Club

Cao Xueqin and Amy Tan

Magical Realism – One Hundred Years of Solitude and Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie

African American Cross Gender – Invisible Man and Song of Solomon

Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison

Everyone must read “Waiting For Godot” by Samuel Beckett



Assignment:

Read a pair of books (one canonical, one contemporary) that represent a similar theme, style, culture. If you would like to choose your own pair, please pass your selection through me first.

whalsey@montvilleschools.org



Writing Assignment: Four to five page essay. Look up the word “essay” on Owl Purdue writing site. This should be an argumentative essay where you develop a thesis that is interesting exploration for you within the books. You must use textual evidence, which means you should collect quotes and passages, annotate your books, highlight – finding ideas and threads is messy, make it so.



Basicially, how do these books talk to each other, disagree, concur, discuss common ideas and themes? Imagine the authors and characters in conversation with one another. Where are you in this conversation – please allow yourself to enter the conversation.



Then – read “Waiting for Godot.” I will set up a blog so you can discuss your readings on Aspen. In a two -page essay, how does this reading change your view of the paired- reading.



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